A Vietnamese Family Chronicle by Nguyen Trieu Dan

Author:Nguyen Trieu Dan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2017-09-29T04:00:00+00:00

On horseback, may you safely go on the three thousand li journey,

While passing through the twelve seaports, I return to my mountains.

An envoy to the Empire of the Middle!

A wanderer in a far corner of the country.

You have won achievements and fame,

While what I have is but leisure and peace.

Those who stayed behind could only imagine what the envoys were going to see: the Wu Ling or Five Mountains Range, north of Guangxi province and long believed to be our ancient borders with China; the Wu Hu or Five Lakes where, in the words of a poem, “the visitor set out on a boat trip, in the clear weather following a snowfall.” So many places and historical events in China had become part of our own literary tradition: the River Wu where Lord Hsiang Wu lost his last battle against the founder of the Han dynasty and saw his dream to rule over China turn into smoke; the imperial city of Loyang whose splendor was immortalized in many Tang poems and the beautiful women of Soochow, sung by generation after generation of Vietnamese poets who had never set foot on China.

A few days before their departure, the envoys were received in audience by King Mac Hau Hop, the fifth of the dynasty, who gave them his last instructions and wished them well for their trip. Following the royal audience, the “hundred mandarins” of the court gave a banquet to farewell the mission. There was a certain urgency about it because our envoys left in the last month of the year, a rather unusual time. All Vietnamese wished to celebrate Tet, the most important festival of the year, at home. Moreover, popular belief considered it not auspicious to start great and important endeavors at year’s end. Let us wait, people would say as they quoted the proverb: “Come the new year, days will extend and months will be longer.” No doubt, our envoys would have liked to commence their mission once Tet was over. But the Mac rulers were keen to resume relations with China, broken thirty-eight years ago since the ill-fated Le Quang Bi’s mission. Perhaps also, negotiations over the terms of the mission had been difficult, with the Chinese demanding the payment of tributes missing over the past period and the Vietnamese claiming for guarantees that delegation members would not be retained in China against their will. Chinese agreement to receive the mission was welcome news to the Mac king who implemented it without delay. Our envoys were not given the luxury of greeting the new year and setting off for their diplomatic journey when the days and months were “longer.”

On the auspicious third day of the twelfth month, at an auspicious hour chosen by the Ministry for the Rites, they departed from the capital Thang Long. Ten days’ travel and they arrived at the town of Lang Son, still a day’s march from the official crossing place to China which was the Nam Quan pass. The name Nam Quan was imprinted in our national history.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.